Crime and punishment: Chief Compliance Officers who fail, get targeted by law enforcement, as cases in UK and the U.S. do demonstrate

Key trends from the U.S. Dodd-Frank Whistleblowing Program annual report

Technology-enabled ethics and compliance is ready for takeoff

Cybersecurity: A risk that needs to be on your ethics and compliance to-do list

While this selection might be somewhat skewed towards an anglo-american perspective on compliance management (e.g., the strong focus on any kind of compliance-ROI), at least 6 of the identified trends ring a bell in continental-european, especially German ears as well!

These interview-partners describe a growing importance of cybersecurity issues, they see – quite obvious when focussing on current German policy discussions – regulatory issues that tend to drive „a one size fits all“-approach as well as gender-discussions.

And, yes, there is no way for midsized and smaller companies to avoid embracing compliance and integrity. Who still thinks, his (mostly) or her firm can do without it, will pay dearly. This is – by and large – no more a prediction, but a fact.

Alas, although sharing a view that these topics might be relevant, there is still some dissent that technology or unified processes might be all the answers. Culture very often is the root cause for many compliance-dysfunctionalities. It is also an essential part of any answer to overcome the more complex forms of resistance to integrity and compliance management.

In intercultural terms, it seems to be quite interesting to notice, how much leeway we allow for individual dilemma management and integrity leadership vs. process-driven solutions: in the end both perspectices are neccessary – whatever will be the real trends for 2015.

The report deals with interagency communication and intelligence challenges revolving around nuclear threats and their assessment, management, and containment during crisis response activities.

Due to heavy redaction, the released study is partly unreadable, but still fascinating!

In his assessment, Ellis concentrates on aspects of the intelligence cycle and simulation. From the perspective of organizational innovation (read: highly skilled experts from different fields to define joint areas and processes in a high-complexity-environment, such as innovation- or R&D-units) it is equally interesting how much effort in the HR- and culture-related recommendations has been made to foster mentoring and mentor-mentee-couples in order to achieve expertise-transfer: time to have a fresh look at mentoring and peer coaching in R&D and areas of comparable complexity?

… well, somewhat at least, as there is no longer only Recorded Future on the playing field.

They are ahead of the crowd, as they have rapidly expanded and promoted the integration of other services with their offerings (such as imaging, ethnographic sentiment analysis or forensic data analysis software), making higher value-offerings as well as conceding (at least as subtle byline) that the new toys are by themselves not as far-reaching, as expected …

But, while Google ventures-backed Recorded Future aims high at the intelligence and security communities, Seattle-based Blab seems to be targeting primarily those who want to see the next shitstorm coming right ahead (as a comment at „Gruenderszene“ aptly states it).

„GDELT is an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world over the last two centuries down to the city level globally, to make all of this data freely available for open research.“ (website)

„GDELT is the most ambitious effort to date to overcome these problems, and that ambition is helping to pull empirical social science in some new and productive directions. GDELT uses software to scour the web for media stories that contain information about a large but predetermined array of verbal and physical interactions. These interactions range from protests, threats, and attacks to more positive things like requests for aid and expressions of support. When GDELT’s software finds text that describes one of those interactions, it creates a record that includes numeric representations of words or phrases indicating what kind of interaction it was, who was involved, and where and when it took place. Each of those records becomes one tiny layer in an ever-growing stack. GDELT was only created in the 2010s, but its software has been applied to archival material to extend its coverage all the way back to 1979. The current version includes roughly 2.5 million records, and that number now grows by tens of thousands every day.“ (Jay Ulfelder)

Of course, GDELT is not perfect (not in its current form and one may question, if it will ever be), as e.g. Weller and McCubbins have pointed out.

But it offers some fascinating insight into trends and directions of massive social science data analysis and current and future analytic as well as pedagogical applications!

Currently, Ulfelder’s concluding remarks perfectly resonate with my own feelings towards these new „tools of the trade“:

„I’ll wrap this up by saying that I am still really, really excited about the new possibilities for social scientific research opening up as a result of projects like GDELT and, now, the Open Event Data Alliance it helped to spawn. At the same time, I think we social scientists have to be very cautious in our use of these shiny new things. As excited as we may be, we’re also the ones with the professional obligation to check the impulse to push them harder than they’re ready to go.“ (Jay Ulfelder, see above for source)

Just to share some very interesting links on predictive modelling in politics (and overlapping areas with crowd-based research) from Jay Ulfelder’s excellent and well written blog „Dart-throwing Chimp„: